The sparks of war

Vietnam at 50: 1967

It’s 1968 that was the bloodiest year of the Vietnam War, but 1967 – the year that set the foundation for the bloodshed to come – wasn’t far behind in its body count. In sharp contrast, this was the year in which the “Summer of Love” saw protests from the serious to the absurd cross America.

The sparks of war

Viewed through the prism of time, the years after World War II can seem like an idyllic era, with U.S. power supreme, the middle class thriving and families living stable “Ozzie and Harriet” lives after decades of war and economic depression.

Love, protest, music and ‘madness’

1967 was a time of change and hard questions, a coming of age for a generation with bipolar views about the war. It was the year that those who answered the call to serve and those who burned their draft cards battled for the identity of their generation.

Charlie Company, 1967: an unlikely friendship

From massive moments of traditional warfare like Operation Junction City, to battles in defense of exposed and vulnerable Marine bases along the Demilitarized Zone like Con Thien, to stealthy long-range reconnaissance patrols – American forces across the length and breadth of South Vietnam sought to bring overwhelming firepower to bear on their North Vietnamese and Viet Cong foes.

Vietnam and Hollywood: The realism quotient

As far as authenticity is concerned, Hollywood’s Vietnam War films have run the gamut from uncannily realistic to cartoonishly foolish. The producers and directors of the most realistic films have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure everything you see and hear on screen is as close to the real things as possible. Other directors, well, have not. Which are the best of the best? Read to find out.

High school with highest death rate in Vietnam embraces its legacy

Thomas Alva Edison High School, had the highest casualty rate during the Vietnam War of any high school in the United States – a fact that’s confirmed by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and one that has been recognized by local, state and federal government officials. It’s a designation the school has embraced.

Documentarians peel back decades of pain in 'The Vietnam War'

The culminating chapter “The Vietnam War,” the epic documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, brings together former enemies as they try to make sense of the war.

War stories: Vietnam War journalists share examples of courage

Vietnam-era war correspondents wore uniforms, ate field rations and shared many of the deprivations and dangers of ordinary fighting men. Five decades later, their ranks are thinning but those who remain are still telling stories.

US, Communists locked in a bloody stalemate

The year 1967 was a turning point in the war, a period of violent escalation when the U.S. military deployed larger troop formations, waged bigger battles and killed hundreds of enemy fighters. The Communists, meanwhile, learned from their losses.

1966: Troops and protests increase, enemy digs in

Vietnam at 50: 1966

1966 was a formative year for America as its military began to increase its presence in Vietnam.
Read more about the year’s major events in these features collected from the men who were
there.

An introduction to 1966

It was the year of the reality check, when Americans and their own government began to realize
just what they faced in Vietnam — a resourceful and tenacious enemy, quarrelsome allies
and an Asian society whose complexity they could barely understand.

Vietnam: The first rock and roll war

The sonic revolution and one-upmanship that defined 1966 make a compelling case to call it the greatest year in music history.

Authors explore the music of the Vietnam era

Doug Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, and Craig Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, met at a Christmas party at the Madison Vet Center in
2003.

Marines reunite, reminisce about The Basic School

Most of them took the military road before they knew it was headed to Vietnam. They were high
school graduates in 1962 – intelligent but not necessarily wealthy, and for many, ROTC scholarships
meant a free ride to a college degree.

Two pilots, once enemies, now friends

Tu De, a 16-year-old from Hanoi, spent most of 1966 learning how to fly fighter planes in the
Soviet Union. Capt. Pete Peterson, a 10-year Air Force veteran, kissed his pregnant wife
and children goodbye, and headed off to bomb enemy routes in Vietnam

Flying solo in 1966 with a thousand missions to come

While President John F. Kennedy was sending more military advisers to Vietnam, I was attending
the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps classes in the armory at the University of Oklahoma.

Decades later, vet goes back to Vietnam for good

Michael Cull is sipping a smoothie on a beach deck at the Sailing Club, sitting in nearly the
same spot he did as a soldier 50 years ago.

Stumbling into war

Vietnam at 50: 1966

In his inaugural address in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson made no direct mention of the
war in Vietnam. But within weeks the president would redefine America’s role in the war with
dire consequences for the country, his presidency and American optimism and faith in government.

What led the US to the Vietnam War?

On March 8, 1965, two battalions of about 3,500 Marines waded ashore on Red Beach 2 — becoming
the first American combat troops deployed to Vietnam. In the ensuing months they were followed
by thousands more combat forces, making 1965 the year the United States transformed the Vietnam
conflict into an American war.

New role in Vietnam has dire consequences

At the dawn of 1965, America was assured of its moral supremacy and confident in a future shaped
for the better by its own enterprise, ingenuity and vision. Fighting in Vietnam was not yet
a major concern and few foresaw how it would divide the country and cultivate an abiding
cynicism and distrust in government.

From the front lines of Ia Drang Valley: ‘Killing, dying and suffering indelibly marked us
all’

Joseph Galloway, 73, is a veteran war correspondent who did four stints in Vietnam, including
a 16-month tour in 1965, during which he covered the pivotal Battle of Ia Drang Valley. Despite
being a civilian, Galloway was awarded a Bronze Star with “V” device for valor by the Army
for rescuing a badly wounded soldier under fire.

Budding anti-war movement 'changed everything'

On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech decrying the brutalization by
200 Alabama state troopers of hundreds of peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma planning
to march to the state capitol in Montgomery. “Our mission is at once the oldest and the most
basic of this country — to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man,” he said.

A friendly chat between Marines and Viet Cong

Fifty years ago, two of the men sitting around this table at the Red Beach Resort were enemies
of the United States. Decades later, they sat down to talk to Marines they once called foe.

Families in Hanoi in 1965 evacuated, often separated

In 1965, the U.S. began Operation Rolling Thunder, an air campaign aimed at encouraging the
beleaguered South, while reducing the communist North’s morale with targeted bombings. By
the end of the year, more than 180,000 U.S. troops were at war in Vietnam.

Features

Vietnam's lasting legacy

Vietnam's lasting legacy

The draft forced hard choices for the men who fought, and those who didn’t. But it also led
the way to today’s professional all-volunteer force. And the fear of another Vietnam quagmire
became the lens through which today’s military action is viewed.

Legacy etched in Vietnam wall, Jan Scruggs ready to retire

No one had heard of Jan Scruggs until he took a week off to start planning what would become
one of the most recognizable monuments in the country.

The lingering stigma of the 'troubled vet'

As Vietnam veterans came home, they were often stereotyped as being angry, depressed and unable
to cope with society. For some, that was reality. Others simply wanted to live an ordinary
life, far removed from the battlefield.

Returned photos reveal a father never known, 50-year-old promise kept

Army Pfc. Pierre Mathieu Van Wissem went to Vietnam in 1965, and part of him never came home.
Now, more than 10 years after his death, his adult children have learned new things about
him, thanks to a tenacious Okinawan man.

Decades later, 'Vietnam syndrome' still casts doubts on military action

The Vietnam War’s lasting impact on America’s foreign policy is largely characterized by doubt,
in the opinions of many analysts. Driving those doubts is the desire to avoid another open-ended
commitment with an uncertain endgame.

Volunteers scattered across the country have been working to gather photos of every one of
the 58,300 dead American servicemembers whose names are listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Vietnam leads to the death of the draft and the rise of the professional soldier

While Vietnam was a low point, it also served as the engine of change that brought about perhaps
the single greatest reform to transform the military in the post-Vietnam war era: the launch
of the all-volunteer force.

Vietnam POW returns to the Hanoi Hilton in search of closure

Lee Ellis recounts his time as a prisoner of the infamous Hanoi Hilton. His return to Vietnam,
decades later, brought back memories better left in the past.

Features

Voices from Vietnam

Voices of Vietnam

For some, it takes only six words to sum up what it was like to serve in Vietnam. For others, the memories take more time to unravel, with passages full of exact dates and names and ranks and, mostly, unhappy endings.

“VIET VICTORY NEAR,” blared a headline across the top of Stars and Stripes’ front page.Farther down the page, a smaller article titled “3 Aides Seized in Vietnam Battle” told a far less celebratory tale.

For those who prepared Vietnam's fallen, a lasting dread

Gary Redlinski says he can hear the Hueys, Chinooks and C-130s, all bearing dozens upon dozens of bodies in a never-ending procession. The putrid smell tickles his nose.

Rolling Thunder escalated US involvement in Vietnam's civil war

In 1964, Keith Connolly was a young Air Force pilot and was among the first Americans to fly sorties in the F-100 Super Sabre fighter bomber targeting the North Vietnamese communist insurgency.

War forced hard choices for those who fought and those who did not

Millions of Americans in the 1960s and early 1970s had to decide what they would do when called to serve in a conflict that had mushroomed into the most polarizing event in the nation’s history since the Civil War.

Weapons of war: US military tries to adapt to unconventional warfare

Among the many notable changes in weaponry and tactics for the U.S. military during the war, one of the most enduring was the reliance on helicopters as both a transport tool and an offensive weapon.

As the war rages abroad, counterculture rocks America

In 1959, “Leave It to Beaver” was in its second season on TV, the first Barbie dolls hit store shelves and Elvis Presley was on the music charts. That same year, North Vietnamese communist forces began building the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Southeast Asia.

When the civil rights movement became a casualty of war

Sammy Younge Jr., a black former Navy sailor attempting to use an Alabama gas station “whites only” restroom, was shot dead by the station attendant. Days later, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee became the first civil rights organization to oppose the war in Vietnam.

Features

Ia Drang Valley: Where the US truly went to war

A wounded Soldier of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, is attended to by fellow comrades during the fight for LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam in November 1965. Photo extracted from U.S. Army motion picture footage.

On Nov. 14, 1965, soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, loaded onto helicopters and flew to a remote patch of ground in the Ia Drang Valley of South Vietnam’s central highlands. Within an hour, they came under attack for the first time by North Vietnamese regulars, launching a four-day battle that killed hundreds of Americans, perhaps more than 1,000 Vietnamese and changed the course of the Vietnam War.

The Ia Drang Valley is where the U.S. truly went to war.

After years of advising the South Vietnamese against the communist North, and months of chasing black-clad guerrillas, a large formation of American troops faced well-trained, well-equipped regulars of the People’s Army of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese enjoyed numerical superiority in the valley. Unlike Viet Cong guerrillas, the northerners were prepared to stand and fight.

“It had been a small undeclared war mainly fought by South Vietnamese troops with a few U.S. advisers in the mix, sometimes on the ground, sometimes in helicopters,” said Andrew Wiest, a history professor at the University of Southern Mississippi and the founding director of its Dale Center for the Study of War and Society.

“It was much bigger than what we had seen before against a much more tenacious enemy,” Wiest said of the battle. “The largely (North Vietnamese Army) units we ran into, they were interested in staying and fighting.”

Fighting was so intense that a battalion commander, Lt. Col. Hal Moore, reported finding a dead American “with his hands at the throat” of a dead North Vietnamese soldier. Three U.S. soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery during the battle.

Mindful of the effects of propaganda, each side declared victory. Moore considered the outcome a draw.

By whatever measure, the chaotic, bloody Battle of the Ia Drang Valley set the tone for the rest of war.

To the Americans, the battle validated their new “airmobile” strategy — using helicopters to move troops quickly into remote jungle areas often without roads and inflict heavy casualties by airpower and artillery.

The outcome convinced the North Vietnamese that they could reduce the threat of U.S. firepower by engaging the Americans at close quarters where U.S. airstrikes would prove risky and then melt away into the jungle or across the border into sanctuaries in Cambodia.

Each side realized it was fighting a war of attrition. The only question was which side could outlast the other.

The battle was part of a campaign for control of the strategic central highlands, which divided South Vietnam north to south. Controlling the central highlands would enable the North Vietnamese to cut the south in two and separate South Vietnam’s northern cities of Hue and Da Nang from the capital Saigon to the south.

A month before the Ia Drang operation, North Vietnamese regulars attacked a U.S. Special Forces base at Plei Me, hoping to lure the ineffectual South Vietnamese army out of its base at the provincial capital Pleiku and destroy it. U.S. airpower lifted the siege and drove back the North Vietnamese.

Lacking confidence in the South Vietnamese, Gen. William C. Westmoreland ordered the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division, which had been in country about a month, to pursue the enemy, using newly minted airmobile tactics. Moore and his 450-man 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, flew into Landing Zone X-Ray at the base of the Chu Pong Mountain west of Plei Me and miles from the Cambodian border.

U.S. intelligence knew that North Vietnamese regulars — probably a single regiment — were in the area. Shortly after landing, a U.S. patrol captured an unarmed North Vietnamese deserter who told them that three regiments, roughly an entire division, were hiding in the nearby mountain.

About 40 minutes later, North Vietnamese launched their attack, hiding in the tall elephant grass and in stands of trees. A U.S. platoon was lured into a trap and surrounded, holding off repeated North Vietnamese attacks despite the death of the platoon leader and several non-commissioned officers.

After two days of intense North Vietnamese attacks and mounting casualties, Moore radioed the code word “Broken Arrow,” calling for all available aircraft to rescue an American unit about to be overrun. The airstrike broke the North Vietnamese siege and enabled reinforcements to reach the LZ.

Moore and his battalion were evacuated the next day, Nov. 17. A fresh unit, the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, was ordered to march from LZ X-Ray to LZ Albany a few miles away.

Shortly after the battalion set out, the North Vietnamese sprang a massive ambush. Nearly 70 percent of the battalion’s soldiers were killed or wounded before airstrikes, artillery and reinforcements drove the North Vietnamese into nearby Cambodia. It would remain the U.S. military’s single bloodiest day in Vietnam through the entire war.

Among the survivors of the ambush was 1st Lt. Rick Rescorla, a platoon leader who died Sept. 11, 2001, rescuing people from the World Trade Center’s south tower until it crashed around him.

The North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas absorbed even higher casualties from better-equipped American troops on the ground as well as helicopter gunships and B-52s raining bombs, bullets and napalm.